


Hope and Family

by Veestag



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Families of Choice, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:40:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27885394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veestag/pseuds/Veestag
Summary: Yusuf and Nicolò want a family. Nile is their hope.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 4
Kudos: 86





	Hope and Family

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone, I hope you enjoy this short fic! I watched the movie and wanted to write something!

A little over sixty years after Yusuf and Nicolò had stopped killing each other, and had figured out they preferred to be together instead, they stare through a window at a baby. It is dark, so that they will not be noticed. A beam of moonlight shines on the little girl’s cheek, still pinked from the labours of birth.

The baby is Yusuf’s three times great niece. She looks small and vulnerable in her crib. Her soft skin will grow with her, tan in the sun and gain scars, wrinkle if she is lucky enough to live to an old age, and then rot in the dirt. Inevitably, she will die. Maybe not today, or the next, or even another sixty years from now. But she will die, unlike Yusuf and Nicolò.

When they had been a little younger, less knowledgeable about their situation, Yusuf had made it a point of keeping an eye on his older brother’s family. After it became clear that Yusuf wasn’t ageing, even as Abdullah greyed with time, he had stopped letting his family see him. There would be too many questions.

As Yusuf and Nicolò stand outside the window of the newest member of Yusuf’s extended family, who does not know him and will never know him out of necessity, Yusuf says goodbye. It is too painful to keep watching his family die while knowing that the ordinary joys and pains of life can never be known to him.

Yusuf has Nicolò now. It is enough. It has to be enough. Nicolò, who had never had a family, and Yusuf, who had watched his family die and become strangers to him, have to live eternally with the fact that their family will forever be two.

Although their love burns with a passion, it sustains itself on the knowledge that theirs is a shared path, and any path shared cannot be lonely.

…

In the 1750s, in a town in France, Nicolò and Yusuf, then with Andromache, save an orphanage from being caught in the midst of fighting. They defend it from soldiers who want it for its strategic value placed at the top of a hill.

While it is often messy choosing a side of every war to fight on, hoping it is the better one, to defend children is never a question. Before they leave, Nicolò leans into Yusuf’s side, watching the children.

“I wish we could give one a family,” Nicolò whispers into Yusuf’s curls.

“I know, _habibi_.” Yusuf has the same wish. They both know why it is impossible, unfair to both the child and to them. Their dangerous lives are no place for a mortal, no less a child. Losing a child, whether to violence or a natural death, would destroy them.

…

When Sebastien loses the last of his three sons, Yusuf and Nicolò grieve with him. Sebastien grieves for his boy in the way only a father can. Yusuf and Nicolò grieve for their friend, and for the possibilities they know can never happen. People around the world wish for immortality selfishly, without thought. They do not know that immortality is painful, unless everyone you love is immortal too.

…

Their little makeshift family of immortals dreams of a woman in Afghanistan, the dark skin of her neck slashed open. She looks young, probably in her early twenties. She’s just a baby, barely left the womb to them.

Nile inserts herself into their team and into their hearts. She is someone who it is safe to love.

In the aftermath of Merrick, Nicky and Joe resolve to be her family now. Late at night, curled in each other’s arms, Nicky whispers of possibilities long forgotten again. Joe holds him closer, and allows himself to dream along with his eternal lover.

Perhaps it is a little unorthodox to become the adopted parents of a newly immortal twenty-five-year-old, but they’ll make it work. Nile is a gift, a miracle. She needs people to guide her and to be her family. It is a perfect fit—Joe and Nicky yearn for someone to guide through life without the threat of losing them.


End file.
